Tag: separation

Where God tears great gaps we should not try to fill them with human words.They should remain open.Our only comfort is the God of the resurrection, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,who also was and is (our) God.~Dietrich Bonhoeffer from “Circular Letters in the Church Struggle”

Great gaps are being torn in families, kept separatein hospital ICUs and overflowing emergency rooms,where patients struggle for breath and fight for life –yet too sick, with too much risk for loved ones to be near.

Christ too knew separation from His Father,a chasm that appeared wholly unbridgeable-forsaken, suffering for His brothers and sistersby paying with His life a ransom we could never satisfy:we being so dead broke and captive to our sin.

His grace is the only bridge able to bear our weight,even noweven nowwhen our hearts break with uncertainty and fear.

We seek the comfort of a grace strong enoughto fill our every holebridge our every gapcarry hope to our hopelessnessand restore us wholly to our Fatherwho was and is our God.

Lord, comfort us by spanning our troubled waters,bearing our weighty burdens,to make sure we get safely to the Other Sidewhere Your arms await us.

This year’s Lenten theme for Barnstorming:

God sees us as we are,loves us as we are,and accepts us as we are.But by His grace,He does not leave us where we are.~Tim Keller

Good things as well as bad, you know are caught by a kind of infection.

If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life,you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them.

They are not a sort of prize which God could, if He chose, just hand out to anyone.
They are a great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very centre of reality.If you are close to it, the spray will wet you: if you are not, you will remain dry.

Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever?
Once a man is separated from God, what can he do but wither and die?~C.S. Lewis- Mere Christianity

Each Monday morning, as I transition once again from the observance of Sabbath with God’s people to move into the secular world of government work, I feel an acute separation.

I want to remain infected (and contagious) with the reality of God yet my life feels necessarily compartmentalized.

On Monday, I’m gloved and masked to prevent my infecting others.

All week I am exposed daily to the reality of the world and must defend myself from getting infected.

If I’m to be contagious, let it be because I’m overwhelmed with the Spirit, not the world.

I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded;
not with the fanfare of epiphany,
but with pain gathering its things,
packing up,
and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night. — Khaled Hosseini from The Kite Runner

My mother was 58 when my father left her for a younger woman. For weeks my mother withered, crying until there were no more tears left, drying inward from her edges.

It took ten years, but he returned like an overdue high tide.

She was sure her love had died but somehow forgiveness budded, that dry pool refilled with water somewhat cooler to the touch, yet more amazing, overflowing in its clarity.

You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you. ~ Frederick Buechner

Once again we bid goodbye. It never gets easier to part from one’s family members when their calling is far away.

I began writing regularly 14 years ago to consider more deeply my time left on this earth and what my family meant to me, here and now, and for eternity.

Family is carried inside the words I write without my often writing about them directly. They inspire and challenge me, they love and stretch me, and as our children have now gone out into the world, two now married, I am assured they are sustained by what they have carried away from this home.

Life is not just about living in the world but what world you carry deep inside. We can never really be lonely; our hearts will never be empty. We have each other forever, even miles and miles and lifetimes apart.

Let me say finally, that in the midst of the hollering and in the midst of the discourtesy tonight, we got to come to see that however much we dislike it, the destinies of white and black America are tied together. Now the races don’t understand this apparently. But our destinies are tied together. And somehow, we must all learn to live together as brothers in this country or we’re all going to perish together as fools. …Whether we like it or not culturally and otherwise, every white person is a little bit negro and every negro is a little bit white. Our language, our music, our material prosperity and even our food are an amalgam of black and white, so there can be no separate black path to power and fulfillment that does not intersect white routes and there can ultimately be no separate white path to power and fulfillment short of social disaster without recognizing the necessity of sharing that power with black aspirations for freedom and human dignity.~Martin Luther King,Jr.– in one of his last speeches, given at Grosse Point, Michigan high school (near Detroit) to a mostly white and often heckling audience, March 14, 1968

I grew up during the 1960’s in Olympia, Washington, a fair-sized state capitol of 20,000+ people at the time and our city had only one black family.

One.

There were a few Japanese and Korean families, a few Hispanics, but other than the Native American folks from the nearby Nisqually Reservation, our community seemed comprised of homogenized milk. Pretty much plain white.

In 1970, a white Olympia High School graduation student speaker caused a controversy resulting in numerous parents walking out of the ceremony she called our town a “white racist ghetto” in her speech. It was the first time I’d heard someone other than Martin Luther King, Jr. actually crack a previously unspoken barrier using only words. What she said caused much anger, but the ensuing debate in the newspaper Letters to the Editor, around lunch counters at the five and dime, and in the churches and real estate offices made a difference. Olympia slowly, in recognition at being called out for racism, began to open its social and political doors to people who weren’t white.

Heading to college in California helped broaden my white and limited point of view, but in the 70′s there were still few diversity admissions initiatives, so it was still a mostly white campus. Living in Africa to study wild chimpanzees in Africa in 1975, I experienced being one of two whites traveling among hundreds of very dark skinned Tanzanians on trains and boats in the interior of the country. I became the one gawked at, viewed as an oddity, pointed at by small children who were frightened, amused and perplexed by my appearance, and so constantly felt out of place. I did not belong. Yet I was treated graciously, with hospitality, although always a curiosity.

Returning to the Northwest meant blending in with homogenized white milk again. Although there was some minimal diversity in my medical school class (even women constituted less than 25% of my class of 1980), it wasn’t until I was in family practice residency at Seattle’s Capitol Hill Group Health Cooperative Hospital that I began to experience the world in technicolor. I joined a group of doctors in training that included an African American activist from the east coast, a Kiowa Indian, several of Jewish background, a son of Mexican immigrants, a daughter of Chinese immigrants, a Japanese American, someone of Spanish descent, and a Yupik Eskimo. Not only was I challenged to articulate how I perceived our inner city patients’ cultural, racial, religious, ethnic and sexual minority context, but I witnessed how much more effectively my colleagues and teachers worked with patients who looked or grew up like them. It was such a foundational experience that I was drawn to a medical practice in a Group Health Rainier Valley neighborhood clinic. There I saw patients who lived in the projects that lined Martin Luther King Way, struggling to overcome poverty and social fragmentation, clustered together in diverse little knots of extended family within a few square miles. There were many ethnic groups: African Americans, Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian refugees, Ashkenazi Jews, Middle East Muslims, Russian immigrants and some Catholic Italian families who spoke broken English. I delivered babies who would grow up learning languages and traditions from every corner of the globe. It was a wide world of diversity that walked into my exam rooms, enriching my life in ways I had never imagined.

I found that white milk, nurturing as it was, was not a reflection of everything the world had to offer and pretty bland all on its own.

When I married and we were starting our own family, we made the decision to move north near my husband’s home community of Lynden, a town of Dutch dairy farming immigrants. We planned to own our own farm to raise our children in a rural setting just as both of us had been raised. There was significant adjustment necessary once again even adapting to a primarily Caucasian community. I am not Dutch even though I am as white and tall as the Frieslanders (some of my ancestry is from Schleswig-Holstein in Germany, right across the Holland border). I still didn’t belong.

I didn’t have the same cultural or church background to fit in easily in my new home. The color of my skin no longer made me noticeable, but the difference in rituals, the language quirks and traditions stood out. In other words, the milk looked just as white, (maybe skim versus whole or 2%), but varied significantly in taste (were the cows just let out on grass??)

Even with those apparent differences, our rural community has transformed over the last twenty six years since we moved here. We have two growing Native American sovereign nations within a few miles, the Nooksack and Lummi tribes, along with increasing numbers of migrant Hispanic families who work the seasonal berry and orchard harvest, many of whom have settled in year round. My supervisors where I work are African American. Our close proximity to the lower mainland of British Columbia has brought Taiwanese, Japanese and Hong Kong immigrants to our area, and East Indians immigrate to our county in large extended families, attracted by affordable farmland. A rural corner grocery only a few miles from our farm was built and managed by Sikhs who have stocked the shelves with the most amazing array of Indian spices and Mexican chili sauce, with Dutch peppermints and licorice thrown in for good measure.

Our children have grown up rural but, as adults, have become part of communities even more varied. Nate teaches multiracial students in an international high school in Tokyo, Japan and married Tomomi a year ago. Ben just finished two years as a Teach for America high school math teacher on the Pine Ridge Lakota Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, and married to Hilary, they are a racial minority in their mostly black neighborhood in New Haven, Connecticut. Lea is completing her Education Degree with a Spanish emphasis and spent last semester attending a variety of Hispanic churches in the Chicago area. Our children are privileged to work within the kaleidoscope of humanity and our family is blessed to be multiracial.

Homogenized means more than just uniformity. It is a unity of substance, a breaking down of barriers so there is no longer obvious separation. Martin Luther King, Jr. called it amalgam — a mixture that yields something stronger than the original parts. I call what has happened in my life a homogenized amalgam. I am still all white on the outside — I can’t change that — but strive to break down barriers that separate me from others who live, work and worship around me who will enrich my life. It can’t help but improve the flavor.

Google Translate

A physician’s chronicle of faith, family and farm life in rural northwest Washington state.

I come from Pacific Northwest farmers going back three generations, the daughter of teachers, married to a son of farmers; we have raised three children who are making a difference in the world as teachers and people of faith.
While keeping my eyes and heart open to the extraordinary things around me, I work as a full time primary care physician in a University setting, as well as a steward of the small farm we call home.
What I can harvest in words or pictures finds its way here.
Contact email: emilypgibson@gmail.com

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Listening to Others…

...whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. ... And the God of peace will be with you. Philippians 4: 8 -9

What is my only comfort in life and in death? That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.
~Heidelberg Catechism

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
~Mary Oliver

I must consume the abundance of moments now. Days I am overwhelmed, wanting to write the music of my life in a slower tempo … yet this is the glorious dance of now.
So I shall dance in bare feet. For I am on holy ground.
~Ann Voskamp "A Holy Experience"

To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life.
~ T.S. Eliot

A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.
~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

To live is so startling, it leaves little room for other occupations.
~Emily Dickinson

I believe in God as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
~ C. S. Lewis

Remember this. When people choose to withdraw far from a fire, the fire continues to give warmth, but they grow cold. When people choose to withdraw far from light, the light continues to be bright in itself but they are in darkness. This is also the case when people withdraw from God.
~ Augustine

Hello, sun in my face. Hello you who made the morning and spread it over the fields...Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.
~ Mary Oliver

The seed is in the ground. Now may we rest in hope while darkness does its work.
~ Wendell Berry

Nothing will sustain you more potently than the power to recognize in your humdrum routine the true poetry of life.~ Sir William Osler

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
~George Eliot's final sentence in Middlemarch

If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
~ E.B. White

Geese appear high over us, pass, and the sky closes. Abandon, as in love or sleep, holds them to their way, clear, in the ancient faith: what we need is here. And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye clear. What we need is here.~~ "The Wild Geese" Wendell Berry

Let it come, as it will, and don’t be afraid. God does not leave us comfortless, so let evening come.
~ Jane Kenyon from "Let Evening Come"

You can only come to the morning through the shadows.~ J.R.R. Tolkien

If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for. ~ Thomas Merton

This life therefore is not righteousness,
but growth in righteousness,
not health but healing,
not being but becoming,
not rest but exercise.
We are not yet
what we shall be,
but we are growing toward it.
The process is not finished
but it is going on.
This is not the end
but it is the road.
~Martin Luther

Ten times a day something happens to me like this - some strengthening throb of amazement - some good sweet empathic ping and swell. This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.
~ Mary Oliver

Love isn’t a function of communication so much as Love is a function of communion.
~ Ann Voskamp

It is not your love that sustains the marriage —
but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.
~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

She has done what she could...
~Mark 14:8

What do you mean? Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good on this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?~ J. R. R. Tolkien from The Hobbit